“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your ******* mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”
― Frank Zappa
@edgarblythe,
The "fruit" is sex. If you don't have sex, humans will not exist. So much for the "garden."
“You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
@edgarblythe,
Having worked with thermonuclear weapons in the US Air Force, each of us working with them had the potential to make them 'work.' We know how all of the safety features worked. I'm sure those same features are used in current weapons.
“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.”
― Niall Ferguson
America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
Sigmund Freud
“Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle
@eurocelticyankee,
Ignorance is the biggest killer of success.
“Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern blacks did, as antiwar protesters did.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
― Audre Lorde
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
Samuel Butler
Now listen lads, I'm not happy with our tackling. We're hurting them but they keep getting up.
John B. Keane
We don't live in a shared reality, we each live in a reality of our own, and causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other.
It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them.
We have given 'taking offense' a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations.
Frankie Boyle
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.
Jonathan Swift
Blackie Sherrod, the Dallas sports scribe, says there once was a West Texas county so dry that "rainwater was wet only on one side."
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
William Butler Yeats
Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. This true for all artists, and it is also true in love and business: You'll make a hundred mistakes for every wise decision you make. You'll speak a hundred poor words for every wise word you utter...[Bob Dylan]
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Samuel Beckett
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
― Elie Wiesel
